The Internet’s Dirtiest Secrets: The Cleaners
BBC Four
★★★★★
Shetland
BBC One
★★★★☆
Just as workplace offices can be found magically vacuumed each morning, desks wiped down and dirty mugs tidied away, so too does the internet have its unseen, low-paid cleaners. That’s where the analogy ends, though. Because the internet’s cleaners, or “content moderators” — charged with binning the nasty material — also have more influence than several dozen frontline politicians and newspaper front pages put together. If they fail to do their job, they could ruin a life or even “trigger war”.
A web content moderator on the beach in the slums of Manila
Which is a worry, you could say. At the start of The Internet’s Dirtiest Secrets: The Cleaners, it was pointed out that “when Facebook acts as censor, it is as